Ava DuVernay’s Selma is a passionate movie, commanding and compelling, all about Martin Luther King and his civil rights march in 1965 from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital Montgomery. At some level, it is also about King’s sombre premonition of a sacrificial destiny. Selma takes its place alongside recent pictures such as Spielberg’s Lincoln and McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave as a film that honourably tackles race, so often the amoeba-sized elephant in Hollywood’s colossal Wasp living room. This it does from a position of strength, as well as idealism and optimism.

Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.
Please
upgrade to a modern browser and try again.

Watch a video review

With the southern states in the 1960s still deliberately obstructing black citizens who tried to register for the vote, and with jury membership and other forms of public office open only to registered voters, a de facto white supremacist confederacy was in operation. King and fellow campaigners realised that the only tactic they had was to force a public confrontation – a march from Selma to demand the right to vote. Black protesters risked injury or death from club-wielding cops, state troopers and the various good ol’ boys and murderous Dixie nostalgists whose violence the politicians covertly encouraged. This confrontation took place on the Edmund Pettus bridge, spanning the Alabama river, a Rubicon of American history. DuVernay shows that this was a military engagement between the armed and unarmed and that Selma was effectively the last battle of the American civil war, the final confrontation erupting fully 100 years after the south surrendered.

Tom Wilkinson plays President Lyndon B Johnson, the hangdog realpolitiker, relying on a diminishing store of charm and yearning to defer civil rights to a more politically convenient time. Tim Roth plays truculent Alabama governor George Wallace; Dylan Baker is FBI chief J Edgar Hoover who plans to use King’s marital crisis against him; and Nigel Thatch is Malcolm X, the coolly supportive warrior who offers to put his own reputation for violence at the service of King’s non-violent movement, as the “bad cop” who will scare the white establishment into his arms. Carmen Ejogo is a cool and contained Coretta Scott King, rising above the condescension of those who well-meaningly think of her as merely dignified. But as King himself, David Oyelowo outdoes all these fascinating smaller roles and gamey supporting turns, brilliantly intuiting the man behind the sonorous and enigmatic public manner. This is a man who displays a kind of calm insistence that he has had to cultivate as a defence against all sorts of racist assault. His King is as focused as a technocrat and as courteous as a Renaissance prince.

Sorry, your browser is unable to play this video.
Please
upgrade to a modern browser and try again.

In their script, Paul Webb and Ava DuVernay have created a King who is agonised with guilt at his infidelities – and indeed at how their consequences caused him to neglect a crucial first stage of the march – but who knows his vocation is now to pour his personal energies, and his identity, into the cause. Oyelowo’s delivery of the speeches is superb, with an ear for their music, rhetoric, and cadences. It has gospel, with a hypnotic call-and-response and maybe even – with his “Stand – up!” – a touch of Eminem.

DuVernay and Oyelowo’s great moment is the depiction of King’s appearance at the second march, after the violent chaos of the first. He appears at the head of a gigantic crowd, swelled by white well-wishers from all over the world. The state troopers make a sensationally unexpected move. What King does in response stuns his followers. Was this a loss of nerve, a mysterious dark moment of the soul? Was it an act of strategic cunning, seeing that he was being led into a trap? Was it an appeasement of the courts, in whose view their march was not yet lawful? For me, what DuVernay does is show King’s act as something else: an act of Zen mastery, a refusal not merely of violence, but of the gloating display of triumph. It was an act that somehow enigmatically secured his moral authority: an extraordinary and absorbing scene.

Oyelowo dominates the screen with something Shakespearian, and his success is certainly a moment to consider the continued success of British actors both black and white in Hollywood and in American roles. (This is also a moment, however, to reflect on Oyelowo’s non-appearance in the Oscar best actor list: I can’t see what else this actor could have done to impress the Academy with his technique, self-possession, charisma and style.) It’s a stirring and thrilling film.